Weekend Reading: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Lawyer, A Men’s-Rights Icon, and More

When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev goes to trial for his alleged participation in the Boston Marathon bombing, the person sitting beside him will be the defense lawyer Judy Clarke, whom Scott Helman wrote about for the Boston Globe. Clarke and a handful of other lawyers around the country have made a specialty of defending infamous clients in high-profile cases. Clarke’s previous clients include Jared Loughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; and the so-called twentieth 9/11 hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui. Helman describes the difficult legal and emotional work that these lawyers do, and tries to investigate what drives them. “The appeal of challenging wrongful convictions is plain,” he writes. “The money, in some cases, can be good.… But what of the worst offenders—the mass murderers, the child rapists, the terrorists? What compels people to defend them?”

In Mother Jones, Mariah Blake reports from a men’s-rights convention, where attendees go to workshops on such topics as male mentorship and male sacrifice. One of the keynote speakers at the convention—and one of the icons of the movement—is Warren Farrell, who first rose to prominence in the feminist movement, speaking out alongside Gloria Steinem and other activists about how feminism can liberate men as well as women. But his views changed over the years, particularly following his divorce, and his book “The Myth of Male Power” became one of the foundational texts of a movement that often veers into bitter and even violent misogyny. Blake explains how Farrell underwent a paradigm shift that many in the movement compare with the scene in “The Matrix” in which, after swallowing a red pill, the hero realizes that “the world he's inhabited … is merely an illusion designed to keep him docile and enslaved.”

If you ever want to rob an A.T.M., one of the quickest and most effective ways to do it is not with a crowbar but with tanks of oxygen and acetylene. The gases, which are explosive when mixed, can be funnelled into the machine and then detonated, causing the A.T.M. to burst open but leaving the stacks of cash inside intact. This method of robbery is quite common in Europe, but, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, it is fairly rare in the U.K. (In the U.S., debit cards are less secure, so it’s easier to steal one than to blow up an A.T.M.) At Bloomberg Business, Nick Summers writes about a rash of A.T.M. explosions in England. They were carried out by a troupe of masked men, driving a black Audi, who could get on and off the scene in fewer than ten minutes. Sometimes they would split up and rob machines in different locations simultaneously. Summers explains how the masterminds behind the team honed their method, and how the police finally tracked them down.